Germany's Mouse on Mars turns years of abstract electronica into pop gold.

Admittedly, past works by Mouse on Mars have sounded like rodents gnawing cheese.

If you visit Cologne, Germany, and venture forth a few blocks from a square called Barbarossaplatz, tucked along a residential side street -- just past the pastry shop with the smiling doughnut stickered on the glass -- you'll find a store called A-Musik. If you're a fan of experimental or electronic music, you'll probably have written down the address before your arrival. A small, sunny boutique stocked with a few thousand hard-to-find LPs, a handful of CDs, and a trove of underground 'zines and out-of-print academic books on everything from sound art to free jazz, A-Musik is like a sister store to Lakewood's Bent Crayon -- but even more esoteric, if you can believe that.

Prominently displayed at the front are all the releases from the Sonig label, an imprint run by Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma of the experimental electronic duo Mouse on Mars, who are close friends and sometime business partners of A-Musik's owners. "We grew up together," explains Toma. "They launched the shop right after we started Mouse on Mars, and we took A-Musik as a home base."

We had a vague knowledge of all this when we stopped by the store a few months earlier. Picking through the stacks of obscure Japanese noise and deconstructed bleepery, we selected a few long-deleted techno-pop 12-inches that happened to be languishing there and sheepishly carried them to the counter, hoping that no one would laugh at our purchase of a Kylie Minogue remix.

We needn't have worried, however. Mouse on Mars's new album, Radical Connector, has turned out to be one of the most unabashedly pop albums of the year, prickly with hooks and flush with sing-along melodies. The record's distressed textures and digital cut-and-paste properties may bear relation to the band's earlier work, but its brash, brassy songs have more in common with the fierce energy and patchwork sensibilities of Basement Jaxx, especially on bass-heavy, funk-infused stompers like "Spaceship" and "Wipe That Sound."

Hardcore fans of the band may initially be put off. Mouse on Mars -- whose sci-fi scuttlings have, in fact, occasionally sounded like rodents gnawing through green cheese -- emerged in the early '90s with a handful of records that fused krautrock-y drones, lo-fi kitchen percussion, and trace elements of tiki-and-mai-tai-inspired exotica (hence album titles like Iora Tahiti). In the decade since, it's gone on to create drifting film scores (Glam), twisted takes on Charles Ives' Americana (Idiology), and even contemporary approximations of Raymond Scott's hyperkinetic cartoon soundtracks from the '30s (Niun Niggung).

Of course, baiting its fans is nothing new -- the abrasive 2-step lark "Actionist Respoke," bristling with overdriven, hyperprocessed vocals, rubbed quite a few longtime listeners the wrong way. Mouse on Mars also collaborated and toured with Stereolab in 1997, so the group isn't entirely untutored in the world of avant-pop. But on Radical Connector, the song forms anchored beneath seething waves of choppy vocals suggest that the band has put in at a port far from any visited on previous voyages -- and this time, everyone is welcome onboard, not just Teutonophiles and completist indie rockers who feel an allegiance to the group just because its Stateside label is Chicago's vaunted Thrill Jockey.

Still, German experimental musicians don't stop being German experimental musicians when they discover verse/chorus/verse structures. "I don't know if you can call it a pop album," hedges Toma, "though of course it works with the aesthetics of pop and the traditional elements a pop song should have.

After the last record, 2001's baroque, excessive Idiology, "we thought it would be good to be more precise, and we thought that if we worked more with lyrics, it would give us the chance to reduce things a little bit more," Toma says. It's an odd way of describing Connector, given that reduction is the last quality that comes to mind when you first hear the 16-bar pileup at the heart of "Mine Is in Yours," the opening track. Dodo, Mouse on Mars's sometime collaborator and touring vocalist, sings a sweet ditty over chiming banjo --then brittle drums, buzz-saw synthesizers, and an array of tweaked, chattering voices bury the melody in a dazzling cacophony.

Indeed, what most distinguishes Radical Connector is the prominence of vocals. Every song features them, though most of the time they're chopped, broken, edited, deconstructed, and morphed into sounds no larynx could produce on its own. Despite their synthetic feel, the album's reconstructed vocals grew from an organic compositional process.

"When we started to record, we had very simple harmonic lines, like classic folk songs or something," says Toma. Working the raw material with "a producer's approach," using the computer as an instrument, St. Werner and Toma began hacking at the sung parts, using hardware and software alike to layer these bastard sounds into complex formations. Each sound's character -- whether sung, sampled, or played -- is twined and tangled into an unrecognizable amalgam.

"The elements of the songs merge into each other even though they don't really fit harmonically," explains Toma. "Each song is really like three elements morphing into each other. It was really difficult to make this happen, because if you just put them together in blocks, in parts, it doesn't work. So the song is really being created on the [mixing] desk, where we're fading elements into each other. I think it's the same if you work with genetic material -- it's really a mathematical thing." Seems geeky, sure, but on disc, it works. In Mouse on Mars's hands, a drum hit unfolds into a bass bulge or a glottal stop in the same way that a rocker's guitar string blossoms into a feedback crescendo. "It sounds kind of hippie," admits Toma, but this idea of energy and flux is at the core of the band's philosophy.

The title Radical Connector can be read in multiple ways -- as Mouse on Mars's attempt to tie all its incarnations back to the band's roots, say -- but most compellingly, the phrase refers to the knottiness of the music itself. What's shocking, then, is how easy it all sounds, which only speaks to the band's care and precision in the studio. "Sometimes you have to be really careful," says Toma. "Suddenly everything falls apart because you want to introduce just one element, or you make one sound louder, and the whole idea totally changes. It's still very fragile."